By HANNAH CLARKIN
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COVENTRY — With $850,000 to be removed from state funding under Governor Donald L. Carcieri’s supplemental budget, Council President Kenneth Cloutier requested that acting Town Manager Paul Sprague and Coventry Financial Director Warren West come up with a list of ways to make up for the lack of funds.

In the event that the budget passes, Sprague and West came up with six recommendations out of which “none are good and all have issues,” Cloutier said.

The recommendations are mostly just ideas, said West. It’s “a list of potential sources in no particular order.”

One possible way to close a part of the deficit is by drawing from the unrestricted fund balance, Cloutier said. It currently contains about $4.9 million. The balance has to be at least $4.5 million in order to maintain the town’s current bond rating, West said, leaving about $400,000 available.

The self-insurance reserve fund is another option, Cloutier said, used to pay workers’ compensation claims. There is about $4.1 million in this fund, according to West. But with claims averaging larger than the annual income of the fund, West said, the town has been eating into the principle for the last couple years.

The cell-tower fund, containing roughly $665,000, according to West, came about from earlier rentals of the cell tower properties in town and the sale of one this past year. This money was originally earmarked for capital improvements, Cloutier said, but has not yet been used.

Reducing pension contributions for municipal contracts could save an estimated $880,000 this year, West said. “If we prepared the same calculation that the governor has prepared for the schools and the municipalities included in the state plan we would reduce contribution by 75 percent in the last five months of contributions.” But given the long term harm of such a reduction, Cloutier said he did not think it was especially advisable.

Two hypothetical options were reducing town services or introducing layoffs, Cloutier said. But these options were not presented with any specifics, West emphasized, and do not necessarily save a lot of money. “There is a whole range of magnitude of reductions we could make — nothing was particularly identified [at the meeting].”

In subsequent meeting discussion the council established that layoffs would be their absolute last resort.

“When you’re brainstorming you look for every possible idea and you throw them all out there,” West said. “The trouble with this deficit is that we have only five more months to offset $850,000.”

In his budget the governor essentially cut out 100 percent of Coventry’s funding, West said. “We had budgeted about $847,000. The previous year we had budgeted about $904,000 but that was cut down during the year so [in fiscal year 2009] we budgeted about $50,000 less than we had received in the prior year anticipating something was going to be happening.

“We planned for something to happen,” West continued, “but not something this bad.”